Community

Contributing Editor

Reneé is a weekly contributing editor of the Wilds, an imprint of Platypus Press. Find her selection of fiction and poetry every Thursday at the Wilds.

Assistant Fiction Editor

Reneé works with the fiction team at Atticus Review, a daily online journal that publishes fiction, flash, poems, creative nonfiction, video, music, book reviews, cartoons, animation, and other ephemera.

Groups

Write Wednesday

Every Wednesday, local Tucson writers gather at the Downtown Cartel Coffee to pursue solo writing projects in companionable quiet with like-minded writers. Write Wednesday is open to all levels of writers. Locations sometimes change; interested writers should tweet at Reneé for location information.

Interviews

“I channel the rote and the new and unseen. My head has always been the busiest of crossroads, a festival of happy and unhappy arrivals. In the hours before daybreak when I was a boy, god sent me words as visitors.”

Teaching

Writers Studio Tucson

The Writers Studio Tucson welcomes beginning and advanced students to a unique workshop environment whose sole purpose is to help fiction writers and poets discover and nurture their own voices. The workshops offer a supportive environment and community to beginning students who learn how to turn autobiographical fragments into successful narrative or poetic pieces. The program also provides technical guidance and professional criticism to more advanced students who are working on longer pieces.

Student feedback

Thank you for The Writers Studio. It’s revitalized my writing practice and stretched me in new ways. It’s challenged me to improve my craft beyond writing for myself into something I hope can be accessible to others. I could never have learned what I have so far on my own. 

Photo Project

Collections

Photo Project

Walk the Line

The summer of 2008, Reneé launched portrait project of mixed-race people and families, seeking faces of people not represented in wider media. Visit the Walk the Line project on her Flickr page.

Reneé explains: "I worked with people who were racial Rorschach tests, people who sometimes negotiated multiple cultures. Sometimes they were people who had privilege to be solidly in one culture and sometimes they were people who had the privilege to jump between cultures. Either way, every day, the people I worked with had experiences similar to mine: walking the line between cultures and races. Sometimes that's a hard walk. And sometimes, as I photographed all these amazing people, I saw just how much it can be a beautiful place, too."

“I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still don't know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song.”

A Non-Traditional

Short biography

Renée Bibby knows things, and if you're lucky, she'll show you. She knows that "the sediment of soap scum is archaeology;" she understands the universal human heartbreak of "how many small dreams can be gotten rid of, just cockroaches on porcelain." To those lucky enough to be her readers and students, she has the power to bestow new eyes, a sharper vision with which to take in the full spectrum of sadness and laughter. Her aesthetic manifesto is a whisper as well as a shout.